Earlier today, we reported on the launch of Google’s new consumer outreach program around guarding your privacy online, called “Good to Know“.

The program is both web-based and will reach out to people in every major corner of the country in newspapers, magazines, as well as New York and Washington DC subway stations. According to USAToday, one of the publications the ads are running in, the campaign is costing Google a pretty penny.

How much? When asked, Google would only share the dollar amount as “tens of millions”. With some calling this nothing more than a PR maneuver to make good with the FTC, Google disagrees. When asked about how genuine the Good to Know campaign is, Google’s director of privacy Alma Whitten had this to say:

We all have family and friends that ask us for advice on privacy and security all the time. Those recurring questions made Google realize it should do something to give everyone a better grasp on the fundamentals of online privacy.

If any company knows the pitfalls of poor communication about privacy, it’s Google. During 2010 the company had back-to-back missteps with privacy issues over its Buzz and Street View products.

Executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, Jeff Chester, isn’t buying the “kindness” Google is putting out there with its ad dollars though:

This campaign should be nominated for some kind of award for fiction. If grades were given out for privacy protection, Google would get a D plus.

Maybe after consumers see the ads in the wild and visit the Good to Know site, that grade can be upped to a solid C. Social networking giant Facebook seems to discuss privacy in a more cost effective way, on its blog.

Musician David Bowie is known for a lot of things, namely his music and choice of wardrobe. On Sunday, the man who turned himself into “Ziggy Stardust” turned 65. Ten years ago, Bowie made a bold prediction about copyright and the music industry that has recently resurfaced.

In an interview with the New York Times, the man who has sold 140 million albums suggested that he soon wouldn’t want to be on a label because copyright would be dead by 2012. It’s 2012 and copyright isn’t dead, but he’s not far off with his predictions:

I don’t even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don’t think it’s going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way. The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing.

Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen.

If you take out the bit about copyright not existing, Bowie is right on target. Everything about the music industry has indeed changed, and he called it way back in 2002. With services like Spotify and Rdio allowing listeners to wade through massive databases of music, the idea of purchasing an album is becoming extinct. Of course Apple’s iTunes isn’t suffering at all, but I’d bet that complete album sales are showing signs of fatigue over the past few years.

Not all musicians are embracing new technologies, as we learned with Coldplay’s stance against streaming music. The band wants to control its own distribution and doesn’t allow its music to be streamed. With digital music sales surpassing physical last year, we’re not done with the evolution of music yet.

For new artists who are trying to gain a following, touring is the best option to get in front of fans. No longer do you need a label to get you a spot on MTV or Radio, the Internet can easily turn you into a star if you have the chops. Just ask Justin Bieber.

In what was first thought to be a spam attack against subscribers of the New York Times, it turns out that it was just an oopsie by the newspaper.

Here’s what the email said:

Dear Home Delivery Subscriber,

Our records indicate that you recently requested to cancel your home delivery subscription. Please keep in mind when your delivery service ends, you will no longer have unlimited access to NYTimes.com and our NYTimes apps.

We do hope you’ll reconsider.

As a valued Times reader we invite you to continue your current subscription at an exclusive rate of 50% off for 16 weeks. This is a limited-time offer and will no longer be valid once your current subscription ends.*

Continue your subscription and you’ll keep your free, unlimited digital access, a benefit available only for our home delivery subscribers. You’ll receive unlimited access to NYTimes.com on any device, full access to our smartphone and iPad® apps, plus you can now share your unlimited access with a family member.†

To continue your subscription call 1-877-698-0025 and mention code 38H9H (Monday–Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.; Saturday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. E.D.T.).

It was a legitimate email though, only meant to go to 300 subscribers. Not 8 million people who gave the company their email address at one point or another. That’s a massive screwup. The internet buzzed for hours, speculating on who would carry out such an evil attack. The company itself first called it spam which fueled everyone’s curious minds.

If you received an email today about canceling your NYT subscription, ignore it. It’s not from us.

— The New York Times (@nytimes) December 28, 2011

A NYT reporter however, told us that it wasn’t spam after all:

UPDATE on NYT email: “The email was sent by the NYT,” a spokeswoman said. Should’ve gone to appx 300 people & went to over 8 mil. Story TK

— Amy Chozick (@amychozick) December 28, 2011

Now the flub is causing more work and confusion for tech bloggers, causing everyone to have to update their posts.

The company has published an official apology from its spokeswoman, Eileen Murphy:

We regret that the error was made, but no one’s security has been compromised

That leaves the New York Times with the age-old question and dilemma of “Do we now send emails to everyone with an apology and explanation?”. Probably not, since it’s a surefire way to get dropped into spam bins all over the web.

And just as I was about to publish this post, the New York Times answered that age-old question with:

You may have received an e-mail today from The New York Times with the subject line “Important information regarding your subscription.”

This e-mail was sent by us in error. Please disregard the message. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.

Sincerely,

The New York Times

Today, Tony Hendra, the English satirist and writer behind The National Lampoon, SPY Magazine, and the cult film “This Is Spinal Tap” launches a new humor site The Final Edition as a satirical, multimedia take on the NYTimes.com, calling it the “first-ever full-on parody of a news website”.

Hendra has enlisted a number of comic geniuses into his cadre including Welsh comedian Terry Jones and NPR’s “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me” Peter Sagal and the infamous social media maven behind “A Bajillion Hits” Alex Blagg [see our SXSW story with Blagg here] as well as writers from Saturday Night Live, The Daily Show, The Onion, and Real Time with Bill Maher.

“One day last summer, I was sent a link to a funny cat video – my 873rd that month. At that moment, I said to myself ‘My friends and I are funnier than cats.’ So TFE was born: smart, funny, 100% cat-free satire.”

-Tony Hendra on why he was inspired to create The Final Edition

Over 30 years ago, Hendra published “Not the New York Times,” essentially a warped version of the now venerated newspaper. He’s also responsible for other similar parodies including My Wall Street Journal and Off the Wall Street Journal. Acting as The Final Edition’s Editor-in-Chief and Founder, Hendra promises it will be “an intelligent, in-the-know antidote to the cat and fratboy humor that dominates the Internet.”

Highlights include: A “Personal Health” column on the terrifying threat to life and limb posed by floors; an op-ed piece that reveals how one of the paper’s most popular columnists is cutting time and costs by outsourcing her columns to Bangalore; a “Personal Tech” column featuring a test of EMS modulation technology that enables users to defrost chicken breasts from anywhere via text message; “Inside Rush Limbaugh,” an animated series featuring Rush’s long-suffering internal organs; “Money or Die,” a hilarious real-time market analysis featuring Money McBags, who’s every bit as crazy as Jim Kramer but with better stock tips; “Mad About Maddow,” Myers’ blog that centers around his obsession with the MSNBC host; and Blagg, who will regularly skewer the hipsters leading the Internet to another dotcom Armageddon.

And you can expect the requisite “comedic” banner ads as seen above and below. Considering the talent Hendra has in his brigade, I expect The Final Edition will give sites like The Onion a bit of a run for their money. I just hope whoever is writing the copy for the banner ads isn’t also managing the editorial. 

Jonathan Tasini was one of the very first writers to jump on board The Huffington Post blogging ship in 2005, reportedly at the request of Arianna Huffington herself. For the past 6 years, Tasini, a union leader and social activist wrote about labor rights, economics and government policy, joining the ranks of The Huffington Post’s thousands of unpaid bloggers.

This past Tuesday, two months after AOL bought The Huffington Post for $315 million dollars in February, Tasini filed a multimillion dollar lawsuit against the media giant. Tasini is working with The Newspaper Guild and the Writer’s Union on the suit, which seeks at least $105 million in damages for more than 9,000 writers. The Huffington Post will have 20 days to answer the complaint.

We caught up with Tasini in New York City’s Chelsea Market, so please excuse the loud noise in our video interview with the Texas born, New York bred, Yankees fan for life. Tasini is the kind of guy who’s friends with his dentist, loves a good romance and takes things in stride, yet he’s also committed the next several years of his life to making Arianna Huffington’s life “a living hell.”

“Hundreds of writers were angry, disappointed and outraged by how Ms. Huffington treated them after the sale. She was personally wealthy before the sale, then she pocketed a huge sum of money, money she would never have gotten without the work of those unpaid bloggers. There would be no sale to AOL, there would be no company value without the thousands of bloggers. She pocketed that money and basically told the bloggers in a Marie Antoinette attitude, ‘Let them eat cake,’” said Jonathan Tasini.

In a statement responding to the filing, AOL spokesman Mario Ruiz called the action “completely baseless” stating, “Our bloggers utilize our platform to connect and ensure that their ideas and views are seen by as many people as possible, It’s the same reason hundreds of people go on TV shows to broadcast their views to as wide an audience as possible.”

Tasini isn’t the only force angry with The Huffington Post. In mid-March, The Newspaper Guild of America, which represents 26,000 media employees across the country, released a statement, encouraging all unpaid writers at The Huffington Post to stop working in support of a strike launched by Visual Arts Source.

Despite the lack of a clear legal argument, The Huffington Post could be in trouble, considering Tasini’s historic past with labor rights cases. In 1993, Tasini filed a suit against The New York Times, claiming they took unauthorized work from thousands of freelance authors. It held that The New York Times was violating author’s rights when it licensed back issues of the newspaper for inclusion in electronic databases such as LexisNexis. The court ruled in Tasini’s favor in 2001 and The New York Times set up an 18 million dollar fund to pay writers in 2005.

But the big difference between Tasini’s current case and his case vs the New York Times, is “unauthorized work,” vs “authorized work.” Simply put, these bloggers agreed to work for free. “We aren’t alleging this is a case of copyright violation,” says Tasini. “At the moment, there’s no copyright violation, although the case and its contours are still evolving.”

“My whole life, I’ve had a passion for social justice. The labor movement has been my home for the last 20 plus years. There’s something in me that intuitively wants to stand up against injustice in the workplace,” says Tasini. “I think what she did was immoral, illegal and at the least stupid. If she had been smart, she would’ve said I will write everyone a small check. If it was $25, $50, etc. I think people would’ve been far less outraged.”

While there are several other media outlets out there who don’t pay their bloggers, Tasini says he will deal with this just one at a time. He hopes his actions will give people the courage to file their own legal challenges or organize in more productive ways (e.g. unions) because, as he says, “across the blogging platform and media industry, writers and creators should be treated decently.”

The Fix is a site about addiction and recovery, but not from the superficial self-help angle. It’s a mix of crazy stories of addiction–drugs, booze and sex– with advice from therapists and doctors.

The site, which officially launches today, was created by Radar Magazine Founder Maer Roshan, who after selling Radar over two years ago, moved to LA and entered rehab for alcohol abuse. Joe Schrank, an “interventionist,” and the Founder and CEO of The Core Company, is also a Co-Founder of The Fix and its Editor-at-Large.

Because Maer is so connected, he has celebs like Courtney Love and Colin Quinn involved. The site will mix serious subjects such as addiction and rehabilitation with humor, celebrity content, feature writing, news, video and Zagat-like reviews of rehab facilities. Imagine an AA after party, hosted by TMZ.

Asked whether it’s appropriate to apply humor to such a serious subject, Roshan told The Observer, “Addiction is a serious thing, but I don’t think it has to be treated in a deadly serious manner…There’s no rule out there that sobriety is supposed to be this dull, earnest monastic exercise. There’s tons of humor in the surreal situations that we find ourselves in. The Fix is certainly not going to ignore that.”

To complement the stories on its site, The Fix created a VYou channel with 20 contributors celebs like Party Girl author and executive editor Anna David, rock mess Courtney Love, actor Tom Sizemore, comedian Colin Quinn, and former stripper Ruth Fowler, as well as counselors like Addicted expert Kristina Wandzilak, psychotherapist Carder Stout, and Transcend Sober Living general manager Justin Hewitt. This girl has to wonder, when is Charlie Sheen getting on board?

Read more about vYou in 11 NYC Startups to Watch in 2011.

The New York Times has today released details of its long-awaited paywall. Opting for a partially free model, users will be able to read 20 articles per month without paying. Beyond that, a range of subscription plans are available.

The plans offer one month’s access to the website and mobile app for $15 for a month, $20 for Web access and the iPad app; while you can access all three outlets for $35 for an all-access plan.

The paywall has gone live today in Canada and will be rolled out to the rest of the world from 28 March.

Interestingly, there are holes in the paywall. Publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. explains that ”Readers who come to Times articles through links from search, blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter will be able to read those articles, even if they have reached their monthly reading limit. For some search engines, users will have a daily limit of free links to Times articles.”

While it’s not unusual for paywalled sites to remain accessible via search, the tactic of allowing social links is actually quite a smart move, as it keeps the New York Times part of the “social conversation” online, something that competitor News Corp opted out of with its recent, blanket high-profile paywall launches in the UK.

However, it’s likely that many readers will wait for interesting Times articles to crop up on Twitter before they read them, rather than paying for acces to the site. It certainly looks like this paywall wasn’t designed to convert anyone other than hardcore readers into paying customers.

In its blog post Mike [raldi] writes that “There are only about 100 sites on the entire Internet that get a billion pageviews in a single month, and now reddit can put on its smoking jacket and join that exclusive club.” A club, mind you, that doesn’t include The New York Times, Expedia, Weather.com, about.com, or Fox News.

Reddit has grown tremendously this year, from 250 million page views in January 2010 to 829 million in December, and more than doubling its number of servers from 50 to 119 in the same timeframe.

In September 2010, reddit pageviews surpassed Digg’s, when Digg founder Kevin Rose revealed that his site only garnered 200 million page views in the month of July. Reddit claimed at the time that they were 40% bigger, traffic wise, than Digg. Then reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s adorable little alien, asked the press to “get with it,” and stop comparing reddit to Digg as a smaller community.

Mike [raldi] sends a big thank you to all of the reddit community:

This is an accomplishment that all redditors should take pride in, because people wouldn’t keep arriving in droves — and coming back — if not for the community that you’ve created here. To see how fast our little site’s been growing, contrast this post from July or this one from last month. Oh, and in case anyone was wondering, the billionth pageview was this submission.

Rupert Murdoch welcomed the crowd this morning at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, with much discussion over News Corporation‘s expanding media empire with the world’s first digital newspaper exclusively built for the iPad.

“New times demand new journalism… and a new service edited and designed specifically for new devices. Our challenge is to take the best of traditional journalism…and combine it with the best of contemporary technology. 360 degree photographs, graphics that respond to the touch are unthinkable in either print or television. The iPad demands that we completely re-imagine our craft. There’s a growing segment of the population that is educated and sophisticated that does not read national print or newspapers…and they expect content tailored to their specific interests…What we are losing today are the opportunities for true news discovery. The magic of newspapers lies in their seredipity and surprise and the deft touch of a good editor….Our aim is to inform people, to make them think and make them smile and help them engage in the great issues of the day. We can and we must make the business of news gathering viable again.” -Rupert Murdoch

The Daily’s digital renaissance launches with 100 journalists including Executive Creative Director John Kilpatrick; two managing editors: Mike Nizza, a veteran of The New York Times, AOL News and The Atlantic and Steve Alperin, a producer at ABC News; LA Bureau Chief Richard Johnson; Editor of Arts and Life, Sasha Frere-Jones; Sports Editor Chris D’Amico; Opinions Editor Elisabeth Eaves; and Apps, Games and Tech Editor Peter Ha. Also on the list is Wired’s Danny Dumas and the New York Post’s Justin Rocket Silverman. Thus far the only active reporter on The Daily’s Twitter stream is The Daily’s Josh Hersh, who is reporting from Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt. Their Facebook page went live moments ago.

Production has been underway for 6 weeks. The first Daily issue features Mubrak and the crisis in Egypt. The Daily’s carousel includes a beautiful visual representation of all the stories in each issue. The stories are completely interactive, and I’m not talking about hyperlinks, you can even record text and voice comments on stories. The Daily will include breaking news, so expect your issue to update repeatedly during the day. The Daily’s apps and games section links right into the Apple store. At its first US only release, their target audience is for 15 million Americans.

The Daily will feature news articles, interactive graphics, videos and photos designed to work with the iPad’s touchscreen. The Daily will cost a mere 14 cents per day, 99 cents a week, $40 per year and will be sold exclusively via Apple’s iTunes store. The first two weeks will be free, courtesy of Verizon. A small selection of the iPad newspaper will be available on its site. A full list of The Daily’s contents:

• Over 100 pages of original news, life, entertainment, opinion and sports

• every single day of the year

• Original video content

• A selection of articles read aloud

• 360 degree photos you can explore by swiping

• Immersive photography

• Interactive charts, info-graphics and clickable ‘hot spots’

• The option to save articles to read later

• Web-friendly versions of articles you can share via Twitter, Facebook and email

• In-app comments – including audio comments

• Your local weather

• Your favorite sports teams’ scores, news and feeds

• Crossword and Sudoku puzzles

The Daily totaled $30 million to set up and will cost $500,000 to run weekly. Subscription will be the larger part of their revenue model at first, but they expect to be moving towards a 50/50 revenue split with ads later in the year. Launch advertisers include HBO, Macy’s, Paramount, Pepsi Max, Range Rover, Verizon, and Virgin Atlantic Airways.

Murdoch expects The Daily to be on all major tablets, but says “last year, this year and maybe next year belong to iPad.” Murdoch’s aim is refreshing, particularly juxtaposed against yesterday’s The AOL Way; Murdoch sees the The Daily has a revival of quality journalism in the digital realm. If this goal truly permeates into The Daily’s ethos, I think we can expect a truly quality and engaging product. Although, since playing with the product, my colleague Martin Bryant, has much to say on Murdoch’s new “newspaper.”

Murdoch’s other publications, The Wall Street Journal, The Times and The Sunday Times, have all introduced paywalls for their websites. The Daily joins the ranks of other paid-for newspaper apps on the iPad including Esquire, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Glamour, GQ and Wired.

“The Daily is not a legacy backed brand moving from the print to the digital world. We believe The Daily will be the model for how stories will be told.” Rupert Murdoch

The Australian mogul is entering the iPad publishing race with Richard Branson, who launched Project magazine on the iPad in November of last year.

• Over 100 pages of original news, life, entertainment, opinion and sports

• every single day of the year

• Original video content

• A selection of articles read aloud

• 360 degree photos you can explore by swiping

• Immersive photography

• Interactive charts, info-graphics and clickable ‘hot spots’

• The option to save articles to read later

• Web-friendly versions of articles you can share via Twitter, Facebook and email

• In-app comments – including audio comments

• Your local weather

• Your favorite sports teams’ scores, news and feeds

• Crossword and Sudoku puzzles